Culture
Award-Winning Poet Edits New Anthology of Appalachian Ohio Writing
By: Tom Hodson
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Neil Carpathios, an award-winning poet and professor of Creative Writing at Shawnee State University, has edited a new anthology of writing about this region.
Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio has recently been published by Ohio University Press.
It is a compilation of regional poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from some 40 writers – some nationally known and some newcomers. Each writer also includes a personal statement about his/her writing.
The book gives a “window into the daily life in the region,” according to Ohio University Press. “It is about the people, landscape, the struggles and the deepest undercurrents of what it is like to be from and of a place.”
The book is divided into four sections: Family and Folks, The Land, The Grind and Home and Away. Each section is a collection of writings about that particular topic, according to Carpathios.
He spoke recently to WOUB’s Tom Hodson and told about the two-year project to bring this book to publication.
Additionally, to bring the book to life, the Shawnee State theater group will dramatize some of the stories and poems in the book. The performance will be on Friday, Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. in the Kahl Theatre in the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Admission is free and the performances are open to the public.
Carpathios received his BA degree from Ohio State University and his MFA from the University of Iowa. He also has taught creative writing at Walsh University. In addition to teaching, he currently writes a weekly poetry column, “Let’s Talk Poetry,” for the Portsmouth Daily Times.
